— Trevor Hoppe, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness (2017), Ch. 1. (via enoughtohold)

Shout out to acclaimed horror mangaka Junji Ito for writing a cute slice of life comedy about competing with his wife for the affection of his two cats and REFUSING to change his eerie, body-horror-filled, vertigo-inducing art style at all for its entire duration

July 30 2020 - Activists against evictions in New Orleans blocked off both entrances to first city court, which handles evictions for rents less than $3000, blocking many landlords during the day who were trying to get into court to get their tenants evicted. Housing is a human right! [video]

This is ace. Proper direct action.

MOROCCO. Marrakech. 1998.

some thoughts on self objectification 

Holy mother of hell

this is a huge reason why lesbians can go years just not figuring out that they aren’t attracted to men. when your whole understanding of attraction is “objectifying yourself to the point that you understand intimacy as a performance to be the perfect sexual object for a man” then the question of who and what you desire isn’t even being asked- let alone answered. 

 a few years back, i read “cinderella ate my daughter" by peggy orenstein (which is an interesting sort of crash course on the ways in which gender roles are really impressed on children through media, capitalism, toys, etc.). I read it like 5 years ago so if I get anything wrong, forgive me; I don’t own the book so I can’t consult it.

but one thing that really stuck with me was a part where the author speaks with (I believe) a child psychologist, and they talk about sexuality of teenage girls. one thing the psychologist mentions is that, when talking about sex, sexual attraction, etc, girls will frame it in terms of how they look, rather than how they feel when asked about their feelings (emotional and physical): “I feel like I look sexy, I look hot, etc,”. from the onset of experiencing sexuality, etc (which really means, going back to childhood, because girls are really bombarded by objectification from the time they’re tiny), girls are already alienated from their own bodies and sense of what feels good, right, or okay.

 no wonder the process of realizing you’re a lesbian can be so difficult; it’s also no wonder that we have so many women who look back and say it took them years to realize that what happened to them was sexual assault, or who look back and say that they weren’t happy or satisfied in relationships but stayed in them anyway, or that women are so constantly critical of their appearances in everything they do. all of it comes down to the fact that women are so alienated from their own bodies, feelings, and experiences. monitoring how you look constantly really creates such a distance between you and your actual life, it takes you out of the moment, it makes it difficult to judge your actual feelings, or create boundaries, or bond genuinely with others, or have positive experiences free of self-criticism. 

cool fact for people who have a problem with looting:

cops in america are legally allowed to take people’s property (including large sums of money) purely because they feel like it. it’s called civil forfeiture and there are literally thousands of cases of pigs taking people’s property. that is looting.

i watched this happen to my roommate after the cops kicked our doors in at 6 AM on a weekday for a no-knock raid that, surprise surprise, didn’t turn out anything. they opened his wallet in front of him, took out about $300 and told him that since they had no record of where it came from on premises, that they’d have to take it from him. they took this man’s rent money right in front of him while he was in cuffs and told him “too bad”. 

there was also a friend’s car in our drive way that had broken down so they left it over night. the doors were locked and the windows were up, and since the owner wasn’t there, they decided it’d be cool to just bust in all the windows to perform another fruitless search. 

In Philly it’s been a HUGE and MASSIVE problem with cops taking people’s bank accounts, cars, electronics and pretty much anything worth any amount of money under a law that lets the DA seize property they think is related to a crime. “Related’ is a vague term though. They once forced a women and her grandchildren out of her home to sell it at auction because her son was found by police with $20 worth of weed.

(Depending on the property in question it can go under Civil Property Seizure or Seize and Seal, they’re not the same law but they work the same)

They don’t have to prove it’s related to a crime before or after, and even if the person suspected of the crime is cleared at questioning or acquitted at trial, you have to go through a MONTHS long process of court appearances (you can’t miss one or be late or you lose, no rescheduling) in hopes that they MIGHT get their stuff back. Most don’t.

Most people don’t think it’s worth the expense of days missed at work and a lawyer to get back a couple hundred dollars or whatever else the police stole. The city makes MILLIONS of dollars each year off this, around $6-10 (The DA doesn’t provide figures)

but tell me more about “good cops.”

because i hate the civil forfeiture system, the NYPD civil forfeiture system keeps no tally of its forfeitures because it would crash their system to compute it, and there may be only one backup of the whole system. a system that seized (an assumed) $68 million in property just in 2013.

Kash Harvest, India Photograph by Biswajit Patra

so 87 people protesting her death have been charged with felonies but the 3 cops who murdered her have had no repercussions?

call the attorney general, daniel cameron, to demand that the officers who murdered breonna taylor – brett hankison, jonathan mattingly, and myles cosgrove – be prosecuted immediately: (502) 696-5300 then press 1. or send an email to the mayor, greg fischer, to demand they be fired: mayor.information@louisvilleky.gov.

takes 3 min to do either of these!

— Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence, Rebecca Solnit. (via kuanios)

Framing this.